Streaming audio service SoundCloud has revamped its iPhone app, with Android to follow, as it looks to capitalise on the fact that two-thirds of its listening now happens on mobile devices – up from half six months ago.

The update has removed the ability to record audio and upload it to SoundCloud in order to focus on listening, boiled down to three key features. First, there’s a feed of music, either from friends and followed artists, or trending tracks from specific genres.

Second, there’s a search function to search for music, comedy, podcasts and other audio from SoundCloud’s entire catalogue. And third, the ability for users to access their personal collection of playlists and liked tracks.

Unlike the existing SoundCloud iPhone app, users do not have to be registered and logged in to use it: if they’re not, they can stream the trending tracks instead. Meanwhile, the app is simpler to navigate around, with bigger, bolder artwork for tracks and creator profile pages.

“For us, it’s a snapshot of how our vision of the listener experience has been evolving. Can we make it more visual and simpler, so it’s easier to discover and hear more stuff, to collect things and listen to them again,” SoundCloud co-founder and chief technology officer Eric Wahlforss told the Guardian.

“The old app has been around for a while now, and it’s really time to change. It’s been completely rewritten from scratch, so it’s way more stable, and we can roll new features out much more quickly. And boiling the app down to a much simpler essence is going to influence what we do back on the desktop in the future.”

Berlin-based SoundCloud launched in 2008 as a way for musicians to post songs online – including embedding them on other sites – and get feedback from fans and fellow artists.

It has since grown into the second biggest streaming music service in the world, behind only YouTube. SoundCloud tracks reach 250m listeners a month, with 12 hours of audio uploaded every minute. The company claims that 90% of those tracks get played, more than half within an hour of being posted.

SoundCloud also played an important role in the rise of Lorde, who uploaded a five-song EP called The Love Club to her SoundCloud profile in 2012, including Royals, the track that took the world by storm the following year.

“In the beginning, we were fantasising about someone breaking through on SoundCloud and becoming a number one artist. Then Lorde did exactly that,” said Wahlforss. “And now we have big artists interacting with up and coming artists, finding new talent and breaking them through their own profiles, reposting their songs.”

The new app reflects SoundCloud’s increased focus on its apps, thanks to that growth in mobile listening. Its Android app has some of the iPhone version’s new features already, with the rest to follow in the coming weeks and months. Other features on SoundCloud’s mobile to-do list include playlist creation, audio caching (for offline listening) and better search filters and suggestions.

“We’re growing extremely fast, and the growth is driven by mobile, so that’s why we’re focusing almost all of our attention in terms of the listening experience on mobile,” said Wahlforss.

“We think there is so much still to do: this version marks the first step. We spent the first five years of the business focusing on building the creator community. Now, since a while back, we’ve been focusing on the listeners. Creators told us they want to build an audience on SoundCloud and connect with those fans. The best way we can help them is by building a larger audience.”

And perhaps also by paying them? Unlike Spotify and other streaming services, SoundCloud doesn’t pay royalties to music labels, publishers and collecting societies (and by extension, to musicians, songwriters and other creators).

Creators uploaded their tracks knowing that this was the case, seeing value in SoundCloud as a promotional platform, as well as one that would provide them with useful analytics on where their listeners were in the world – for example to help plan tours.

It’s been notable over the last year that while some high-profile artists have criticised Spotify for paying low royalties, SoundCloud has escaped similarly-public brickbats for paying nothing.

Artists may be comfortable with its promotional nature – the fact that SoundCloud wasn’t making money itself helped – but behind the scenes, publishers in particular have been grumbling about the lack of royalties.

In 2014, with a reach of 250m people – not to mention a $60m funding round in January valuing the company at $700m – SoundCloud is under pressure to talk about how it plans to make money, and how it plans to then pass a good chunk of that money onto its creators.

SoundCloud's Eric Wahlforss, who is a musician as well as a tech executive.

Wahlforss says the company is working on it. “Right now in the US we’re experimenting with different monetisation approaches. We’re testing out different things: throwing a couple of things out there and testing the waters a bit. We’re super-excited about where this stuff can go,” he said.

“When you have millions of followers and millions of listeners, you’ve got some point expecting there to be some sort of monetisation there. We hear that loud and clear.”

What are those experiments in the US? “We have a bunch of different products that we’ve been testing with brands: we’re doing native-type advertising things, and we’re building a couple of other things as well,” he said.

“I can’t talk a lot in detail about it, it hasn’t rolled out at any bigger scale yet, but we are looking to create a user experience that’s very elegant, frictionless, open and also has an element of monetisation.”

If its new app boosts mobile beyond two thirds of SoundCloud listening, the app will surely sit at the centre of those moneymaking efforts. Wahlforss says that the company is working hard to ensure it works in the interest of its artists.

“Some artists really get this idea of a real-time expression platform where anyone can participate and super-quickly get to listen to the latest stuff. That’s what we want to get to, and we think the artists and labels that embrace that paradigm are the ones who’ll win on our platform,” he said.

“It’s a new medium: it’s the web, right? With any new medium, it’s about learning for 10, 20, 30 years, and then eventually the medium finds its way, and it starts to become really powerful. It’s like film was just filming a theatre stage in the beginning, and photos were just a replacement for a painter in its early days.”

Wahlforss – a musician himself, who records under the name of Forss – thinks SoundCloud is one of the digital services poised to help musicians and other creators to make the most of the web as it moves beyond its initial phase.

“Some artists totally get it already. The knowledge is out there. But not everyone will like it, and not everyone will excel within the constraints of that new medium,” he said.

“Some people are totally attached to vinyl, for example. And I kinda agree: I love vinyl! But it’s not going to get to a billion users…”